Joseph McCarthy: Letter to President Dwight Eisenhower

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

With the election of the Republican Party presidential candidate, Dwight Eisenhower, many assumed that Senator McCarthy would tone down, if not cease, his attacks on Communist subversion of the federal government. After all, an even more important anti-Communist figure, Richard Nixon, who had been instrumental in compiling the evidence against Alger Hiss, had been elected as Eisenhower's vice president. But McCarthy hardly diminished his assault on the security lapses of the federal government, even though Vice President Nixon was able to persuade McCarthy not to make a public show of his opposition to James Conant, president of Harvard University and Eisenhower's nominee for high commissioner in West Germany. Robert Taft, the reigning Republican conservative in the Senate, also succeeded in cajoling McCarthy not to deliver a speech against Conant. But McCarthy could not resist challenging the nomination in a letter to the new president.

McCarthy begins politely enough by telling Eisenhower that as a courtesy McCarthy is writing to explain his position on Conant, whose nomination the Senate would consider shortly. Beginning with the first of four principal objections, McCarthy notes the Conant speech on October 7, 1944, supporting the Morgenthau Plan, which advocated reducing West Germany to an agricultural state. Although the plan was not implemented, in retrospect, at least, it could be seen as a maneuver that would benefit the Soviet Union, since the latter controlled and could industrialize and militarize East Germany. Under the Morgenthau Plan, in other words, the part of Germany controlled by the United States and its allies would not have the capacity to resist an aggressive Soviet-backed East Germany. Even worse, Harry Dexter White, a Treasury Department official accused of espionage by Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, and other former Communists in hearings McCarthy had conducted in the Senate, had been largely responsible for the Morgenthau Plan. This is why McCarthy writes to Eisenhower that the plan “played directly into the hands of our enemy.” McCarthy reminds Eisenhower of his own characterization of the plan as “silly and tragic.” Although McCarthy notes that he is not positing a direct connection between Conant and White, Conant was an unwitting collaborator, nevertheless, in efforts to undermine Western strength.

Then McCarthy takes issue with Conant's Atlantic Monthly article advocating a redistribution of wealth, power, and privilege after each generation. If Conant did not advocate a violent Communist-led expropriation of private wealth and corporations, nonetheless his beliefs would lead to the “complete socialization of any country.” McCarthy does not elaborate on the term socialization, but he clearly intends the term as the opposite of a free, capitalist economy and political structure. In effect, he is arguing that Conant stands for ideas that are inimical to American interests and, specifically, to the way America has prospered.

McCarthy's third concern is that Conant's opposition to parochial schools will cause problems for a high commissioner of Germany. Because most Germans are Catholics or Lutherans and believe strongly in education in their faith, Conant's views could only cause “ill feeling toward America and furnish ammunition for the Communist propaganda guns.” McCarthy is obviously alluding to the U.S. interest in bolstering West Germany as a strong ally opposed not only to East Germany but also to the Soviet-led political movements that were very active in Italy, France, Greece, and other countries. In this global perspective, in the cold war in which the two sides were seeking to bring converts and countries to their side, public opinion in Germany had to remain favorable to the United States. So appointing Conant simply made it more difficult to foster the West German–U.S. alliance.

McCarthy's fourth concern strikes at the very heart of his own political program. Conant, it seems, does not have the proper attitude toward rooting out Communists in higher education. It troubles McCarthy that even though Conant approved of expelling Communists from institutions of higher learning, Conant cautioned that should an investigation discover only a few Communists, then the damage caused by removing them would be greater than the benefit of retaining them. McCarthy disputes Conant's judgment, especially his claim that there were no Communists at Harvard. Prominent professors like Harlow Shapley and F.O. Matthiessen (who had committed suicide in 1951), known for their leftist politics, leads a skeptical McCarthy to suppose that at the very least more investigation is needed, since these professors had been “doing the work of the Communist Party.” The prominent intellectuals had worked in behalf of Communist causes, and in McCarthy's view, anyone aligned with such causes is, by definition, a security threat, someone giving aid and comfort to the enemy. This, in fact, is for McCarthy the very meaning of the cold war: One has to choose sides and be careful not to abet Communist propaganda. Conant moreover seemed blind to this understanding of the Communist menace. McCarthy allows his customary sarcasm to show only once by suggesting that everyone except Conant understood that men like Shapley and Matthiessen were pro-Communist.

If Conant himself is not Communist or pro-Communist—and McCarthy sees no reason to make that charge—he is something just as disturbing, an “innocent” apparently unaware of the brutality of the Communist conspiracy against democratic institutions. How could such a man deal with Communist influence in West Germany? In other words, it is Conant's ignorance and blindness as much as his actual views that disturb McCarthy. To McCarthy, Conant's stance is a good example of the naive fellow-traveling views of academics, government officials, and other intellectuals who do not see that their tolerant views have real-world consequences that would injure the interests of the United States. How could men such as Conant defend America if they do not see the threat Communism poses?

McCarthy does not dispute Conant's integrity, intelligence, or honesty. But he does quote Conant's words against him: Conant's view was that a professor who believed in the betterment of civilization might very well prove a poor choice to represent a government that had to negotiate with another nation. The implications of McCarthy's words are clear: Conant is such a professor—that is, a man devoted to peace and world comity who does not understand the hard truths of national rivalries and, specifically, of the cold war. Conant was just fine as president of Harvard, in other words, but not suitable as a high commissioner of Germany. Yet because McCarthy did not believe he could successfully oppose Conant's nomination, and because he saw that many senators wanted to defer to the new president, he had decided not to put up an “all-out fight” against approval of Conant's nomination. In alluding to Eisenhower's recent and sizable election victory, McCarthy is also clearly unwilling to challenge the new president's popularity.

In his final paragraph McCarthy implies that making public his letter to Eisenhower and carrying on the fight against Conant will only damage the anti-Communist cause. He wishes to do nothing that might aid Communist propaganda. Consequently, he is choosing the lesser of two evils, voting against Conant but also refraining from making public statements about the matter.

One of McCarthy's biographers, Thomas C. Reeves, suggests that McCarthy's letter also served as a warning to the new president—in effect, reserving the right to object to other nominees if Eisenhower exercised poor judgment. This interpretation of McCarthy's letter seems sound, in view of McCarthy's subsequent attack on government institutions—notably the U.S. Army. Even though Eisenhower himself had been leader of the Allied Forces in World WarII and had enormous prestige, McCarthy continued his anti-Communist campaign very much along the lines expressed in his private letter to the president.